Quote collection
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."
"Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance."
"Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual."
"Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not."
"When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish."
"The "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art."
"The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons."
"That tendency of social thought to generalize, to describe a leading tendency in a society in such a way that it seems that everything falls within its iron laws, is very common. Of course our own experience tells us that life is not as monochrome as these thinkers depict it. On the other hand they are very valuable because they alert us to transformations we are likely to take for granted."
"Art is a form of consciousness."
"Books are funny little portable pieces of thought."
"Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims."
"I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting."
"A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness."
"A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once."
"The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall."
"I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature."
"The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention."
"Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick."
"I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things."
"It's almost as if this is the fundamental procedure in modern society: duplication and recycling."